Shyshax snorted a laugh into his thistle brandy. “A yellow month. Or less. Laylan’s a very good hunter.”
“If they come back alive,” said Sham softly.
Shyshax laid his head on the table again. “Yes. If that.”
Chapter 12. The City Under the City
Sevn was raised by his grandfather, Xanlyn, the greatest sword maker of his day. Ironically, nearly all of his creations are now prized possessions of wealthy fauns. Xanlyn lived for years after the fall of Sardor-de-lor on an island of the Tiber-wan on the edge of Canisaria and the Endless Wood. He set up a smithy there, and the fauns came to trade with him. No one bothered him, even after the bounty laws, probably because he was so old. When he died, his grandson disappeared, only to show up some years later with the Raider pack. Sevn didn’t suffer as much as the rest of us. He had friendly dealings with fauns, which is probably why he was gentler.
—Fenrah Ausla, Who We Were
That afternoon, Corry went with his father to the courtyard where the Raiders were staying. Dance howled when he saw them. “Telsar,” said Archemais softly. “Old friend, it is good to see you.” He put his hand on the wolf’s shoulder and they walked off to the far side of the courtyard, where presently Hualien joined them. Archemais spoke with them while the Raiders made preparations to leave.
Laylan kept glancing at Archemais. “He looks almost as though he’s listening to Hualien,” he said.
Sevn smirked. “He probably is.”
“How?” asked Laylan.
“His speech is pitched above the range that fauns can hear,” explained Fenrah. “He talks all the time.”
“I heard him,” said Laylan slowly, “that chittering sound when we were in the tunnels in Selbis. Does he speak Westerly?”
“A bit, but he doesn’t like to. He has his own language. We’ve all picked up some of it, but it’s difficult for a wolfling to speak.”
They left the city just after nightfall. “Did Hualien tell you how he got into the mirror?” asked Archemais as they rode.
“No,” said Fenrah. “We asked, but he’s never given us a coherent answer—just that a wizard put him there.”
“I probably understand his language better than you do,” said Archemais, “and this is what he told me: he said that the mirror’s curse is such that the creatures inside continue to exist only for as long as anyone remembers them.”
Everyone thought about that. “Well, you must have been keeping Dance alive,” said Laylan.
Archemais smiled. “I and Gabalon. I think that was the idea—eventually he and his wizards would be the only ones who remembered any of them. But Gabalon put thousands of creatures into his dungeon, many of whom he didn’t know at all. Hualien thinks that he is a kind of composite, kept alive because the shelts of Panamindorah still remember that rat shelts existed. Hualien remembers many times, many places, many selves.” Archemais hesitated. “He says that the old river had a dam that might be used to cause a flood. He thinks he can find it.”
They camped that night inside Harn-beng at the very spot where Laylan and Chance had come up inside the bridge. Archemais knew the secret of the bridge, but the old road was so ravaged by time and the efforts of wood fauns that he needed Laylan’s help to find the tunnel entrance. “We should post sentries,” he said, “but I think we’re safe here. My brother built this bridge long ago. The tunnel was a well-kept secret even in his day and he will think it forgotten. I’ll take the first watch on the north side. I think Dance will go to the south.”
Corry lay awake after the others had gone to sleep. He listened to their quiet breathing, but his thoughts kept churning. At last, he got up and crept down the tunnel in the direction his father had taken. He concentrated, brought his color sense into focus, and saw-smelled a blacker shadow hunched in the darkness ahead.
Corry padded over to him. Archemais glanced at him as he sat down, but didn’t try to start a conversation. At last, Corry said, “I’ve shifted by accident a few times. The fauns say that iterations can only shift to the animal of their shelt parent—which means I should shift to a unicorn. But the Raiders saw me, and they say I was a dragon. A feathered dragon.”
“The fauns haven’t seen a fully half-blood iteration in hundreds of years,” said Archemais. “Any iterations they’ve run across have only a thread of wizard blood. Don’t take their word for expert.”
Corry licked his lips. “So I could shift to other things.”
Archemais shrugged. “An iteration’s abilities are as varied as the features of his face. Some of them could shift to several things. Others, not at all.”
Corry told his father what had happened when he went over the waterfall.
Archemais looked thoughtful. “Shifting is like flexing a muscle. The muscle grows stronger or weaker with use.” He hesitated. “Can you smell colors?”
Corry looked surprised. “Yes. And sometimes I can hear vibrations in the ground.”
“You’re sensing heat as snakes and dragons do. In human form, you don’t have the proper organs to process the information, so you confuse it with other senses. If you were in snake or dragon form, the sense would be heightened and less confusing.”
Corry let out a long breath. “Then you think I can learn to shift?”
“I’m not sure. I think that when Gabalon sent you violently across the void between the worlds, you lost some things.”
“The void between the worlds,” repeated Corry. “The gray world, the Otherwhere—I’ve been there. I’ve seen those Durian wolves.”
Archemais stared at him.
Corry told him about the centaur on the stairs of Capricia’s study and of his strange escape. “When I was in the Otherwhere, I could see the flute. It was translucent gold, smooth as glass. It was beautiful.” He looked at his father, at the dark pits that were his eyes in the gloom. “What does it mean?”
Archemais frowned. “I’m not sure. A possibility.”
* * * *
The next morning when the Raiders left the bridge, they found four centaur corpses at the entrance to the tunnel. “Sentries,” said Archemais. “I killed them last night.”
They gave the bloating bodies a wide berth and continued. During their years in the city, the Raiders had dug several tunnels under the walls to allow entrance. “This is what we will do,” said Fenrah. “Xerous, Lyli, Talis, and Danzel will go in through the north tunnel. It comes up inside the wall. There’s a storeroom down there, and Sevn says there’s thunder powder in it. With any luck, the centaurs won’t have found the place where the tunnel exits, and even if they have, a centaur would never fit. You’ll lay some of Sevn’s thunder powder inside the outer wall, and when you hear the fighting tomorrow morning, you’ll blow it. If you have time and opportunity, you’ll lay some under the second wall as well.”
Xerous looked skeptical. “It won’t be enough. A hundred pounds of thunder powder couldn’t make a real hole in those walls.”
Fenrah shrugged. “It will make a weak place, though, and it will cause confusion. Laylan, Sevn, Hualien, and I will go in search of this underground river. We’ll go by the east tunnel. Hualien says it’s closer to our destination.”
She glanced at Archemais and Corry. “What about you?”
“Just show us the tunnel into the city,” said Archemais. “After that, we leave you.”
Dance whined. Fenrah glanced at him—still heavily bandaged about the chest. “Oh, no. You are staying in the forest.”
Archemais looked at him thoughtfully. “You want your revenge, but you also want to see your people again. If you had to choose, which would you have?”
Dance growled for a moment. Then he lay down and put his head on his paws. Soon after, the shelts left all the wolves behind. Xerous’s party went south, and Fenrah’s southeast, skirting Selbis at a distance. A light rain had begun to fall when Fenrah’s party came within sight of the walls. “Glacia’s Gates!” exclaimed Sevn. “The centaurs have been busy.”
�
��Not the centaurs,” said Archemais, “Gabalon.”
The forest that had grown up to the walls of Selbis during its years of dilapidation had been burned away in a wide swath around the city. Spike-like guard towers stood at regular intervals around the walls—every one of them whole and gleaming. The red stone glistened under the weeping sky.
The Raiders’ tunnel began under a rock that looked much heavier than it actually was. “When were you planning to enter the city?” Corry asked Archemais as they watched Laylan and the Raiders disappearing into the hole.
“Tonight,” said Archemais. “That will give the wolflings time to work and the fauns time to get here. Night will also make it easier to hide you.”
“Hide me?” echoed Corry. He turned around and saw an amused-looking centaur with gray-green eyes and a cape with a cobra mark.
* * * *
Laylan was watching Sevn as they started into the tunnel. He’d always liked Sevn. They had in common a penchant for invention and a cleverness with their hands. He had no doubt Sevn would have broken the puzzles of his traps, given access to a smithy. Watching him now, Laylan thought he detected apprehension. Hualien kept chattering, but he wasn’t even attempting to speak Westerly, so Laylan could understand nothing.
“What is it?” he demanded after they’d been crawling for some time. “I know you’re worried about something. I can’t help if you don’t include me.”
A long silence. “Hualien is afraid to go down to where the river is,” said Sevn after a moment. “He’s trying to explain why, but we don’t understand.”
“Something about a trap,” said Fenrah.
Laylan relaxed a little. “Traps I can handle.”
She shook her head. “It’s not an ordinary trap. He says it’s in a place that only his rats go. He’s never been there himself, but he knows where to find the door. Don’t speak now; parts of this tunnel are close to the surface.”
They crawled for what seemed a very long way in the dark, and when at last they emerged into a larger space, they were still in underground blackness. They sat and listened for a few minutes, and when they heard nothing alarming, Fenrah lit her lamp. The light showed an ancient basement—cool and musty with moisture beaded on the walls.
They all lit their lamps, and then Hualien started off at a trot. It soon became evident that they were in more than just a basement. Laylan thought he saw the foundations of buildings above their heads. “Selbis is built on itself,” explained Sevn. “It seems to have been leveled and then rebuilt several times, aside from the usual city stacking.”
They went on and on through the system of subbasements, sometimes squeezing through tiny openings or over crumbled walls, sometimes walking in large, echoing chambers. They passed through several crypts lined with alcoves, stacked with bones wrapped in moldering linen. “Do you know where we are?” Laylan asked Fenrah.
She shook her head. “We wolflings didn’t go down here much—just into a few places. Hualien is the one who roamed the lower city.”
“The city under the city,” said Sevn, “that’s what he calls it.”
Occasionally, Hualien stopped and cast about. Sometimes Laylan caught a glimpse of small moving shapes coming or going around them. Several times he thought they’d reached a dead-end, but each time Hualien located some crevasse or a trap door or a tunnel under a wall. They were going nearly always downhill—sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes steeply.
At one point, Sevn said, “We’re under the castle. I recognize those foundations. I was down here with Sham once.”
After that, the rooms got stranger. They descended many stairs. They passed rows of cells, all locked, and through a rusty armory, through a room full of mirrors, a room full of bells, and a room full of chimes. There was a wind in that room, and the chimes rang eerily in the dark. They could hear them long after they’d left that place, and still they went down and down.
At last, they came to a door with characters carved in the ancient picture language. Hualien chattered something.
“This is it,” said Sevn. “This is as far as he’s ever been.”
“What does it say?” asked Laylan.
Sevn listened to Hualien for a moment. “It says: ‘They know the way who are of the blood.’”
“Well, Hualien is of the blood,” said Laylan, “if it’s talking about the rat shelts.”
“He’s not sure it is,” said Fenrah.
Laylan reached out and pushed. To his surprise the door opened easily, though he could see nothing beyond. He held up his lamp, but still saw no floor, no walls. The door opened onto an abyss.
Chapter 13. The Three-headed Beast
Unibus: A unicorn shelt—or perhaps the unicorn itself; the stories are unclear. The Unibus are said to have fled into the Snow Mountains during Gabalon’s reign, but the stories about them are inconsistent, leading one to wonder whether they are complete fictions. Unibus are said to have been able to fold space and to perform other curious feats. Glacia is the name of their mythic city—a utopian ideal, which figures in the afterlife of some faun religions.
— Anson’s Political Encyclopedia of Panamindorah
Sevn lit a piece of cloth and dropped it through the door. The cloth fluttered and came to rest. “We could probably jump down without hurting ourselves,” said Laylan after a moment’s silence.
Sevn said what they were all thinking: “We’ll never jump back up.”
There was nowhere to tie a rope, not even on the door. It had no handle, and the surrounding tunnel was completely smooth. Sevn suggested tying the rope to a sword and wedging it in the threshold, but the threshold proved a little too wide. They’d brought no equipment that might drill a hole in the wood. At last Fenrah thought to try the dagger, but to her immense surprise, it could not penetrate the door. This made them all uneasy.
“We came down here to do a job,” said Fenrah at last. “We have to risk it.”
So they jumped. As Laylan said, the drop was just far enough to give an unpleasant twinge on landing, but not enough to actually hurt anyone. They found themselves in a triangular room, perhaps a dozen paces across. Two walls had openings with no doors. Against the third wall stood a table with three tall candelabra and a number of books. A richly patterned cloth covered the table in purple and scarlet. Above it there was a strange mosaic of a three-headed beast, perhaps a dog or wolf.
Hualien shivered. “He says this place stinks of magic,” said Fenrah. Her black brush of a tail was standing on end. “It’s odd that rats haven’t eaten the candles or the books.”
“We might as well use the candles,” said Sevn, “and save our lamps.” He was examining the books. They were in every conceivable language—the old picture language of middle Panamindorah, the curly writing of the centaurs, glyphs from the far western jungles of the Pendalon mountains, and stranger texts that no one in the group had seen. There were quite a few in the language of modern Panamindorah. “Here’s a book on thunder powder,” said Laylan. “I always wondered how you made that stuff.”
“I could show you,” grinned Sevn. “The trick is to get it stable enough not to blow up in your pocket.” He glanced over Laylan’s shoulder. “I’ve never seen these recipes before.”
“Here’s one on lost races,” said Fenrah softly. “I wonder if it talks about the Durian wolves.”
An impatient chattering made them turn around. Hualien was glaring up at them. Laylan didn’t need a translation to know that he was telling them to quit wasting time. The rat shelt dove under the table and tugged at something. They raised the cloth and stared in horror at the body underneath—scarcely more than rags and bones. The skeleton still clutched an open book.
“Now there’s someone who should have stopped reading for lunch,” said Sevn.
Laylan picked up the book. It was in the ancient pictographs. “He’s been here a while.”
“Let’s make sure we’re not.” Sevn took the candles to light their way, but he needn’t have bothered.
Each room had an identical set on an identical table with the same mosaic above. The only differences from room to room were the titles of the books and the skeletons, which lay in various attitudes of repose, always reading.
“It’s a maze,” said Laylan. “We can light the candles as we go, and then we’ll know which rooms we’ve already been in.” This seemed like a good idea, but somehow they always found themselves back in the room with the door they’d entered by. They tried again and again.
Sevn could not resist reading some of the book titles as they passed. “The Complete Almanac of Blue Moon—but no one knows where Blue is going to be ten years from now!” said Sevn. “That’s why we call it wanderer. What Happened to the Burrow Shelts—well, what did happen to them? As far as I know, they never had any shelts. Surgery and Sleep—wouldn’t Sham go for that one? Why Can Cats Speak?, Hydraulics: how to make water do anything, Mirror Magic, The Nature of Unibus.”
“Sevn, stop it,” said Fenrah. “Don’t you see what happened to the shelts who read these books? And don’t take any of them. There’s something wrong with this place.”
“How long do you think we’ve been down here?” asked Laylan.
“I don’t know,” said Fenrah. “My head hurts. Perhaps we need to eat.” So they had a small meal of dried meat and nuts and then went on, but they still felt fatigued.
“I want to take a few books,” whined Sevn with uncharacteristic churlishness.
“No,” snapped Fenrah.
“Perhaps it’s night,” said Laylan. “Perhaps we’ve been down here all day and half the night, and we need to sleep.”
Fenrah leaned against a wall. “I don’t think it’s night. Or if it is, I don’t think it’s very late. I don’t think we’ve been down here all that long. It just feels like we have.”
“We’re not coming to anymore rooms without lit candles,” said Sevn, “and here we are again.” They were, indeed, back in the first room with the door high in the wall.
The Prophet of Panamindorah - Complete Trilogy Page 44